Skip to main content

Google’s Squoosh will get an image web-ready with in-browser compression

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Compressing images so that they don’t take forever to upload and forever to download for the user, is a hallmark of good web design. Every decent image editing tool offers it, but now you can add Google to the list of providers. Its new Squoosh tool is available in a browser, online and off, it’s entirely free to use, and it’s rather effective.

Recommended Videos

Announced and briefly demonstrated during Google’s Chrome Dev Summit 2018, Squoosh is a creation of Google’s Chrome Labs, which develops experimental tools and web apps. Squoosh is its latest creation and it’s fully featured and freely available now. The tool can take any image and convert it into a PNG, JPG, or WebP format, with a couple of compression algorithm choices. Options include quality percentages, smoothing, resizing, dithering and color palette reduction, among many others.

It even offers a slider to give you a look at detailed before and after renditions of the image, letting you know exactly what you’re losing in image quality (if anything) by making the conversion. It works seamlessly and smoothly throughout conversions, so you’ll rarely find the app locking up (unless you do something drastic like massively increase the size of an image) and even when it does, it’s not for long.

One of the better aspects of Squoosh is that although it is a web app, it works entirely in a browser. That is, once you have loaded it for the first time, it doesn’t need an internet connection to function. It performs the conversions and compressions quickly and accurately all within your browser. It works in all of the most popular web browsers, though Google does unsurprisingly recommend its own, Chrome browser as offering the best Squoosh experience.

It even works on mobile devices, giving everyone no excuse to send mammoth images to their data-constrained friends anymore.

If you’re interested in learning a little more about the developmental process of Squoosh or how it works, the entire source code is available now on the ChromeLabs GitHub page, per 9to5Google.

For a look at some other great, free photo-editing software, here is a guide to our favorites.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
Google’s new Gemma 3 AI models are fast, frugal, and ready for phones
Google Gemma 3 open-source AI model on a tablet.

Google’s AI efforts are synonymous with Gemini, which has now become an integral element of its most popular products across the Worksuite software and hardware, as well. However, the company has also released multiple open-source AI models under the Gemma label for over a year now.

Today, Google revealed its third generation open-source AI models with some impressive claims in tow. The Gemma 3 models come in four variants — 1 billion, 4 billion, 12 billion, and 27 billion parameters — and are designed to run on devices ranging from smartphones to beefy workstations.
Ready for mobile devices

Read more
Google is getting serious about smart glasses, again
Google's AR smartglasses translation feature demonstrated.

Google kicked off the smart glasses trend over a decade ago. Unfortunately, the ambitious idea failed to take off back then. Some say it was a little ahead of its time, while others couldn’t look past the specter of privacy intrusion. But it looks like an emphatic comeback is on the horizon.

According to Bloomberg, Google is in advanced stages of discussion to acquire AdHawk Microsystems, a company that specializes in selling full-stack eye tracking technology already available atop the wearable form factor.

Read more
If you’re on Google’s One AI Premium plan, you now get NotebookLM Plus for free
NotebookLM providing summary of YouTube videos.

As reported by The Verge, Google is bringing the premium features from NotebookLM Plus to its One AI Premium monthly subscription plan. This includes more customization options and higher usage limits, along with extra security.

If you don't know much about NotebookLM, it's been around since 2023, and the Plus plan launched in December last year. It's described as an AI-powered research assistant and note-taking app, but it's not just trained on generic internet content like standard LLMs.

Read more